“BROWN: I don't want justice. I want love.
CYBEL--There is only love.
BROWN--Thank you, Mother. (then feebly) I'm getting sleepy. What's the prayer you taught me--Our Father--?
CYBEL--(with calm exultance) Our Father Who Art!
BROWN--(taking her tone--exultantly) Who art! Who art! (suddenly--with ecstasy) I know! I have found Him! I hear Him speak! "Blessed are they that weep, for they shall laugh!" Only he that has wept can laugh! The laughter of Heaven sows earth with a rain of tears, and out of Earth's transfigured birth-pain the laughter of Man returns to bless and play again in innumerable dancing gales of flame upon the knees of God!”—Eugene O’Neill, The Great God Brown
(This post was inspired by our parish’s new pastor, who read the passage in yesterday’s homily. It reminded me once again how, despite himself, O’Neill the skeptic remained an indefatigable God-seeker. Dorothy Day recalled how one cold winter night in 1917, in a place called, appropriately, the Hell Hole, O’Neill recited from memory Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven,” a poem about how one human soul fled God “down the labyrinthine ways/Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears/I hid from him.”)
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